We're happy to announce the release of Chef v13.12.3 for those using Chef 13! This release includes important security updates plus some great enhancements.

Smaller Package and Install Size

We trimmed unnecessary installation files, greatly reducing the sizes of both Chef packages and on disk installations. MacOS/Linux/FreeBSD packages are ~50% smaller and Windows are ~12% smaller. Chef 13 is now smaller than a legacy Chef 10 package.

macOS Mojave (10.14)

Chef is now tested against macOS Mojave and packages are now available at downloads.chef.io.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15

Ohai now properly detects SLES 15

The Chef package will no longer remove symlinks to chef-client and ohai when upgrading on SLES 15

Updated Chef-Vault

Updating chef-vault to 3.4.2 resolved multiple bugs.

Faster Windows Installations

Improved Windows installation speed by skipping unnecessary steps when Windows Installer 5.0 or later is available.

Ohai Release Notes 13.12

macOS Improvements

sysctl commands have been modified to gather only the bare minimum required data, which prevents sysctl hanging in some scenarios

Extra data has been removed from the system_profile plugin, reducing the amount of data stored on the chef-server for each node

New Deprecations

system_profile Ohai plugin removal

The system_profile plugin will be removed from Chef/Ohai 15 in April, 2019. This plugin incorrectly returns data on modern Mac systems. Further, the hardware plugin returns the same data in a more readily consumable format. Removing this plugin reduces the speed of the Ohai return by ~3 seconds and also greatly reduces the node object size on the Chef server

ohai_name property in ohai resource

The ohai resource's unused ohai_name property has been deprecated. This will be removed in Chef 15.0.

Security Updates

Ruby 2.4.5

Ruby has been updated to from 2.4.4 to 2.4.5 to resolve multiple CVEs as well as bugs: